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With the third game coming out this Winter, I thought it be fun to get back into Starcraft 2: Heart of the Swarm and investigate the Starfriend method for the game. If you are not familiar with Starfriend, it is an emulator that originally came out for Starcraft 2: Wings of Liberty that will allow you to play the game online via dedicated servers outside of Blizzard, or even let you play on your own hosted server online or through LAN!

For those that don’t know, the game does not support LAN so of course this is a major breakthrough!

I recently did a video tutorial on this topic, and I will summarize high level what is involved to get Starfriend to work with your copy of Starcraft 2: Heart of the Swarm. The main forum tutorial link will be at the bottom of this post as well.

High Level Tutorial Summary:

Obtain the game and install. You can login to the Battle.net service, and download a free copy of the Starcraft 2 Starter Edition. If you do this method, make sure you login to the game once, and then log out back to the Desktop.

Get Starfriend 1.x.

Get map cache.

Extract Starfriend anywhere on your computer.

Extract the map cache contents into the root of your Starfriend folder.

Run the Leatrix Latency Fix 1.23.

Start the Starfriend emulator. From the GUI, you can host a server, or join a game that is either your friends/own server or an existing lobby on a dedicated server.

When you login, the username is “gg@gl.hf” without quotes, and the password is “gg” without quotes.

The person who logins first will have a set of stars around the Username which resembles this is the host.

Any person who logins afterwards will be just clients, and they will need for the host to invite them to play.

For more details and to get the files, see the video tutorial and the forum link below. Enjoy!

Did you know that you can play LAN with Starcraft II Wings of Liberty? This game has no real LAN, but thanks to a great program called Starfriend, you can do a real LAN party, or you can take it online and play too!

For more details on this method, go to Battle4sc2.com, or see my video tutorial below. Enjoy!